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Day: January 3, 2010

So, if they want to catch Muslim plane bombers, why don’t they target male Muslim passengers? Why should the law abiding population of the UK be subjected to full body searches, delay, hassle and authority abuse to satisfy a few hand wringing fucking jizznuts?

[M]onitoring the UK’s 1.5 million Muslims is a lost cause. If you have a 99.9 percent accurate method of [profiling and] telling whether or not a given British Muslim is a dangerous terrorist, then apply it to all 1.5 million British Muslims, you’re going to find 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. But nobody thinks there are anything like 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. I’d be very surprised if there were as many as 15. And if there are 15, that means you’re 99.9 percent accurate method is going to get you a suspect pool that’s overwhelmingly composed of innocent people. The weakness of al-Qaeda’s movement, and the very tiny pool of operatives it can draw from, makes it essentially impossible to come up with viable [profiling] methods for identifying those operatives.

“If you were overdrawn and in negative equity, with debts on a dozen credit cards and unpaid bills littering the table, what would you do? Would you try to spend less, or would you set out to spend more?

“Ireland is trying to spend less, with cuts across the board. Everyone will share the pain, from cabinet ministers to benefits claimants. The Taoiseach, who is expected to take a 20 per cent salary reduction, reckons that the new budget will reduce Ireland’s deficit by 4 billion euros.

“The United Kingdom, by contrast, wants to spend more. Alistair Darling will continue to expand the budget, and will raise taxes accordingly.

Well, it turns out not everyone in Ireland is sharing the pain (H/T The Irish Economy)

On budget day, the Minister for Finance announced that civil servants earning between €165,000 and €200,000 would take pay cuts of 12% while those earning over €200,000 would take pay cuts of 15%. Yesterday, with the public focusing on their pre-Christmas preparations, the government announced that this would not be happening after all.

Hmmm, I’m not entirely sure this is where I think fiscal stimulus should be directed.